∴ikura

Files with Extinct

OSC is a protocol designed for passing small
messages over UDP. True enough, OSC should
be employed using small messages, especially given
that a UDP maximum payload is accepted to be
512-bytes. Moreover, when piping around data with
Extinct,
the size of Unix pipes can be limited to
a couple kilobytes as well, so there are a lot of
forces at play that keep messages small.

However, for larger messages, Extinct has a
mechanism to handle bigness with ease. Since
release 2018.c
(9ef3464),
one can pass the OSC data to a file (rather
than pipe), then pass that filename as argument to
Extinct. An example is as follows:

path/to/priv/bin/extinct path/to/large-file.dat

With that, one can transmutate OSC messages
to ETF, messages containing oodles of data,
without worry.

You can see this at work with the ‘esoteric’
sample data:

make esoteric_sample

Running that, you’ll yield an Erlang term from a
few kilobytes of data which outputs
{hello, world}.